I laid him between the rocks at the side, just under where the bank was going to fall, and then I went up and pushed the bank down upon him." She looked up and cried defiantly: "Father'd as soon lie there as in a cemetery!" Although it was as if she was crushing beneath her heel that worship of conventionality which had made Bates try to send the body so far to a better grave, there was still in her last words a tone of pathos which surprised even herself.

Something in the softening influences which had been about her since that crisis of her young life made her feel more ruth at the recital of the deed than she had felt at its doing.

"I made a bed of moss and leaves," she said, "and I shut up the ledge he lay in with bits of rock, so that naught could touch him." "But--but I dug there," cried Bates.

(In his surprise the nervous affection of his breath had largely left him.) "I dug where the bank had fallen; for I had strange thoughts o' what ye might have been driven to when I was long alone, and I dug, but his body wasna' there." It was curious that, even after her confession, he should feel need to excuse himself for his suspicion.
"There was a sort of cleft sideways in the rock at the side of the stream; you'd never have seen it, for I only saw it myself by hanging over, holding by a tree.

No one would ever have thought o' digging there when I'd closed up the opening with stones; I thought o' that when I put him in." He got up and took a step or two about, but he gave no gesture or prayer or word of pain.